Year of 2015 – life in the strange world of consulting

I am surprised and touched after logging into here after more than a year tans found continuously high traffic volume…so much so that I’m thinking of picking this back up…no promises, though. ＝P

In any case, I have to say that it has been one of the most exciting periods of my life since I last posted (which, I guess, contributed to my not posting here).

Trajectory:

During this time, I:

left the prop painting job in Disneyland;

signed an offer with consulting firm McKinsey & Co.;

got my advanced scuba diving license and dived for a month in Thailand and the Philippines;

went to study representational painting in Florence;

climbed in China’s top rock climbing spot Yangshuo;

went to a ‘mini-MBA’ organized by McKinsey in Amsterdam;

backpacked from Holland to Poland;

got back to Princeton and defended my PhD thesis (yes, I finally did that);

volunteered in a wildlife conservation area in Kenya;

came back to Shanghai and settled down to start consulting;

The above took us from November 2014 to July 15th, 2015. Since July 15th I have been role-playing as a consultant in the strange corporate world. According to Fortune magazine, I am officially working for “the most well-known, most secretive, most high-priced, most prestigious, most envied, most trusted, most disliked management consulting firm on earth,” it’s understandable that no client or content related to work can be mentioned here, so I’ll just talk about cool stuff I do outside of work, or life in general = )

Consultant costume:

Let’s pick up where we left off: I was painting props in Disneyland, moving from a sub-contractor to a general contractor, then hopefully to Imagineering (i.e. moving along the path described in ). All looking pretty promising in October 2014, until I hit a brick wall called internal politics >.< (won’t go into details) The result is that I decided to leave and find another way.

By some completely random sequence of events, I learned about this thing called consulting, in which I heard one can move around the world and across industries to solve problems. I decided that it sounds pretty cool and went for an interview, then two more follow-up interviews, then I signed the offer.

McKinsey turns out to be, umm, not much like what I imagined (for example, the ‘traveling around the world’ part have not happened yet; in fact I have been completely stuck in Shanghai since July >.<). But one thing I am very grateful for is that they let me pick when to join, given a window of one year since the contract. I picked July 2015 to have 7 months to complete many things I’ve always wanted to do, planned and budgeted with the aim of using up the whatever small amount of saving I had. You’ve already seen the results above ^_^

A few things I learned from the 7 months pre-consulting:

It’s important to make time and systematically complete things one wants to do, so that they don’t accumulate

Spending all of one’s money on cool stuff feels great, I’ll aim for doing this periodically

Going out and do things often unlocks next levels for pursuing the interest (a lot like video games)

A few things I learned from the 5 months with McKinsey:

Unlike in mathematics where I stare at a blank paper for weeks before putting down a stroke, people here start ‘doing’ things immediately; This takes a lot of pressure away and wish I have done things more like this in academia

The corporate world is not very creative, but strangely spending time on manual tasks satisfying and increases my urge to be creative during personal time

When things are not ideal (e.g. being stuck in China) one should: 1) try as hard as one can to move within the orginazation in the right direction 2) do things outside of work to completement what’s non-ideal

Plans going forward (laundry list, mostly for myself to check back when I get bored and can’t think of things to do) – it goes roughly from shorter term to longer and more involved items which I have less clue about how to proceed:

Do interesting side-projects on weekends, such as:

Design and build a working Turing machine with my recently obtained LEGO Mindstorm EV3 (I would need some help on this from my mathematical blog readers: Anyone have a good set of turing machine notes? I remember spending lots of time writing the states back in my undergrad days, need to refresh those memories but lost the notes)

Think about topology – sometimes I feel the need to read/think math in order to verify that I’m not becoming more stupid in this job =P

Climb Kilimajaro in February 2016 – this was originally part of my African trip this June, but due to lost passport in Kenya it didn’t happen. Just booked the flight

Oil painting – follow up with connections built in Florence, possible next painting workshop in Rome, Venice, Paris or Sweden

Sculpture – would be great to start that at some point, ideally marble, in Florence or London

Flying – Go to Arizona and actually complete my pilot license (did’t get very far at all in Princeton due to weather and the fact that Airport is 30 min biking away from school >.<), can be done in a month with good weather and intensive flying

Diving – Need to do more boat diving in interesting spots, see whales, sharks and shipwreck

Rock climbing – Back to Yangshuo, follow up with connections built there with the rock climbing community, improve ratings, eventually move to large walls and climb El-Captain

Wildlife conservation – 1) Follow up with LUMO in Kenya, re-visit, try to fund my cattle program to prevent locals to kill Lions 2) Good NGOs to try connecting with: WildAid in China for stopping Ivory and shark fin demand and Save the Elephant in Kenya 3) explore how might I get McKinsey involved

Industrial design – Potentially get a masters in that, either ArtCenter or Europe

Disney (Imagineering or PIXAR) – Remains a huge void and question mark I need to figure out… Have to get there at some point in life… Ideally through building a portfolio and reputation in visual development

Hopefully that would keep me occupied for some time =P

I would aim to write here whenever there is any thing intellectually interesting going on. Let me know if you have any suggestions for bits of things I can think of/write about!